Most high-capacity routers today are chassis-based systems. A typical chassis-based router has a number of slots where router modules can be plugged into, and the router modules are interconnected via a backplane or mid-plane fabric of the chassis. The scalability of the system is therefore limited by the number of slots provisioned and the capacity of the backplane or mid-plane fabric.
Software defined networking (SDN) is an approach to building a computer network that separates and abstracts elements of the networking systems. It has become more important with the emergence of compute virtualization where virtual machines (VMs) may be dynamically spawned or moved, to which the network needs to quickly respond. Also driven by popularity of compute virtualization, network virtualization addresses the need of separating the IP address space of tenants in a multi-tenant data center network.
SDN decouples the system that makes decisions about where traffic is sent (i.e., the control plane) from the system that forwards traffic to the selected destination (i.e., the data plane). OpenFlow is a communications protocol that enables a controller (i.e., the control plane) to access and configure the switches (i.e., the data plane).
We have disclosed a system and method of using commodity OpenFlow Ethernet switches to produce a switch fabric. Such a switch fabric can be used to redirect IP packets from a packet redirect source to a packet redirect destination. For example, a packet redirect source has captured some IP packets and would like to redirect them to a packet redirect destination for network traffic analysis. Redirecting a packet in this disclosure means that an IP packet is not forwarded according to the destination IP address of the packet; instead, it is to be forwarded to the packet redirect destination. In this invention, we disclose a method of redirecting IP packets through the switch fabric disclosed or a switch fabric of similar forwarding characteristics.